About pygame

Pygame is a cross-platfrom library designed to make it easy to
write multimedia software, such as games, in Python. Pygame
requires the Python language and SDL multimedia library. It can
also make use of several other popular libraries.

Installation

You should definitely begin by installing a binary package for your
system. The binary packages usually come with or give the
information needed for dependencies. Choose an appropriate
installer for your system and version of python from the pygame
downloads page. http://www.pygame.org/download.shtml

Installing from source is fairly automated. The most work will
involve compiling and installing all the pygame dependencies. Once
that is done run the "setup.py" script which will attempt to
auto-configure, build, and install pygame.

Much more information about installing and compiling is available
in the install.html file.

Help

If you are just getting started with pygame, you should be able to
get started fairly quickly. Pygame comes with many tutorials and
introductions. There is also full reference documentation for the
entire library. Browse the documentation from the documenantation
index. docs/index.html.

On the pygame website, there is also an online copy of this
documentation. You should know that the online documentation stays
up to date with the development version of pygame in svn. This may
be a bit newer than the version of pygame you are using.

Best of all the examples directory has many playable small programs
which can get started playing with the code right away.

Credits

Thanks to everyone who has helped contribute to this library.
Special thanks are also in order.

There's many more folks out there who've submitted helpful ideas, kept
this project going, and basically made my life easer, Thanks!

Many thank you's for people making documentation comments, and adding to the
pygame.org wiki.

Also many thanks for people creating games and putting them on the
pygame.org website for others to learn from and enjoy.

Lots of thanks to James Paige for hosting the pygame bugzilla.

Also a big thanks to Roger Dingledine and the crew at SEUL.ORG for our
excellent hosting.

Dependencies

Pygame is obviously strongly dependent on SDL and Python. It also
links to and embeds several other smaller libraries. The font
module relies on SDL_tff, which is dependent on freetype. The mixer
(and mixer.music) modules depend on SDL_mixer. The image module
depends on SDL_image, which also can use libjpeg and libpng. The
transform module has an embedded version of SDL_rotozoom for its
own rotozoom function. The surfarray module requires the python
Numeric package for its multidimensional numeric arrays.

Todo / Ideas (feel free to submit)

License

This library is distributed under GNU LGPL version 2.1, which can
be found in the file "doc/LGPL". I reserve the right to place
future versions of this library under a different license.
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html

This basically means you can use pygame in any project you want,
but if you make any changes or additions to pygame itself, those
must be released with a compatible license. (preferably submitted
back to the pygame project). Closed source and commercial games are
fine.